A voice yelled at him, her voice. ‘Don’t you give up on me. You shout rubbish, you sing worse than a sick cat. You should keep strong. We can do this, can get there. You and me, as it is meant to be. Your future, and mine, is there . . . There is a road behind the shore. There are cars on the road. I saw the road from headlights, they showed a tank beside the road, an old Soviet one, it is where we are on course for. While you talk like an idiot, sing nonsense, I am steering us. I direct us. The tank is my target. It is a Soviet tank, I recognise it . . . Our future, our lives together, is about reaching the tank. You’ve done so much, come so far. For our love, keep strong. Please, for the future and for love.’
He tried to kick. Had heard her, each word. Tried to kick and could not.
‘Do we have this sort of kit available?’
Back from the surveillance car, Daff showed off the new toy she’d been loaned. She passed Boot a pair of binoculars, bulky and heavy and with image intensifier capability. He did not answer, thought petulance was bred by extreme tiredness, excessive stress.
She said, ‘They have good kit and are good people, and they seem interested in taking good care of us – but within limits.’
‘Have they, are they, do they – and the limits?’
‘There are no patrol boats so they will not be picked up out in the river, no collusion can be shown. That I suppose is good. Given no help and . . .’
A soft-spoken query. ‘They . . . You said they, and intentionally?’
‘It is Merc, and he is in the water. On the board and in Merc’s suit is a young woman. I seem to remember, we said passengers were not an option, inked it pretty hard. The glasses showed her clearly. She came up on a wave. It is a young woman.’
‘We did, insisted and emphasised.’
‘Which puts his own safety in jeopardy.’
‘Indeed it does.’
‘God knows who she is. If she hazards Merc I’ll bloody strangle her.’
He detected the emotion, her feeling of proprietary rights over any late-comers who might be floating down some awful torrent river on the fringes of Europe. Ridiculous, went without needing to be said, because if Merc were hazarded and seriously, like a case of drowning, any bit of a girl would go with him, and Daff would need to strip to a bikini and go into the water and fish her out before getting those powerful hands round the necessary windpipe. Emotion, and he could thank the blessed Lord that he was seldom troubled with it. He thought he had seen the second head when the board had crossed the cone of light thrown out by the vehicle’s headlights on the far side, but he had said nothing. He reckoned that too few of the younger generation of recruits coming into the Service had learned the glories of silence. He remembered the callow youth in the hotel room and brief talk of a family that consisted only of a sister who wanted to be a concert pianist and of course had the talent but . . . A shrug had been given as a reason why a career was off the tracks. He imagined the barter done on the hoof. Taking the bomb into the building, staying there and not running out, being certain that it detonated with maximum efficiency. He knew that Nikki, manipulated like a marionette puppet in a Stockholm hotel room, some carrot and an amount of stick, had not survived. Had he lived, then the radios the Estonians monitored would have broadcast Wanted warnings and named him. Like a street-market trade, and the sister balanced the scales . . . And his mind moved on and he began to consider ways in which ‘disinformation’ could be scattered round, grains to fall on fertile soil.
She had not finished. ‘Boot, what I don’t understand . . .’
‘What do you not understand?’
‘This, Boot . . . There was an officer at the bridge, and he fired. He prevented an escape from their territory. Earlier, a dinghy was holed, and one of the other boys drowned. Before that, the third of them was killed in the forest. Hardly squeamish . . . We think that same officer is across there, and they had the chance. Could have shot. Had them in the headlights. Could have, did not. Boot, why?’
He did not think she would have understood. He was a public servant. He lived with his wife in a semi-detached house in a conventional street, and shared train carriages and buses with ‘ordinary’ people when he went to and from work, and his wife was knowledgeable in antiques and his expertise was in the safety of the realm and its citizens. He did his best and pushed legal matters to their limits and sometimes strayed well beyond, and did the Almighty well when called to act that role. If the men and women who followed his instructions died or were mentally destroyed then he could always fall back on the hackneyed line that all good outcomes carry a cost. There would be a time, might be close, when he decided that enough was enough, that the price of it was just too bloody extortionate – that the burden of the state should be borne by someone else, hunger satiated. And just a few days ago it had seemed run of the mill, and quite interesting, a matter with promise. His man was out on a swollen river, and half frozen to death, and with a young woman with whom he had no obligation nor argument. He mouthed, silently, what the great Duke had said on that evening after riding the length of the battlefield, Copenhagen stepping over the dead and the wounded and the shattered equipment of war. Said to himself, not to Daff, ‘It has been a damned serious business’. A good turn of phrase, and appropriate. It has been a damned serious business . . . it has been a damned nice thing, the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life. And Boot thought he had run his time. Thought also, that an officer on the far side of the river, probably middle-aged, a careerist, had grown equally weary of interrogation rooms and dawn raids and the sight of quivering broken idiots opposite him, and had not bothered to shoot. Might just have experienced tedium, lost the stomach for it after his afternoon’s hard work.
Boot said, ‘Why he didn’t shoot? I’ve not the faintest idea.’
Merc no longer sang the old chapel hymns, and had lost sight of a Mercedes car, and it was the water of the Narva river in his mouth and throat, not the taste of English beer, and the sound of waves in his ears, not conversation or laughter.
He had been about to drift. She would only have known if she had twisted her whole body, risked coming off the board and slithered half round on her stomach and had little grip in the suit. If she had not done that, she would not have known that the drift had begun. She had kicked him. Hard in the face and might have bent his nose and had cut his lip. That sort of kick. He had not the energy to wring her leg or pinch it, nor to bang it down on the board. He took the kick, and thought she yelled at him, but he could not make out her words. It would have taken more than a kick to provoke him. She had to go back to her former position, arms either side, legs apart and trailing. He had one hand on the strap and one hand on her leg and his nose hurt but it seemed a small matter.
Merc saw lights away to his left and they were confused and went by him and it was beyond him to figure their importance. They grew closer, but it meant little to him. He heard a shout, a woman’s abuse, and did not place it. Merc slept.
Did not dream and saw no one that he knew. He went to no place that he had been to before. Was not on the Oxford Road and not in the lanes around Stoke Poges, and was not on Route Irish or the highway between Kabul and Jalalabad, and was not under the walls of the citadel in Erbil, and he had no sense of time. Nor any sense of discomfort. Water came over him and he swallowed some of it and coughed it clear. More shouting but he did not recognise the voices. A little moonlight shafted down, a prettiness to it. And he was grabbed. Fists clutched at him and he woke, and did not know who held him, where he was, and he fought them, and he was punched in the face, and quietened.
He heard, ‘Steady down, Merc. It’s all right, it’s good. You made it, bloody brilliant, star boy, what we always knew . . .’
‘. . . God, it’s bloody cold in here.’ Daff hung on to him.
She had a hold of Merc’s collar and then worked an arm under his elbow and had better leverage. She was up to her waist and the bank was shelving steeply, and he had gone limp after that first thra
shing of arms and legs, and the attempt to break free. There was no light on them. She understood that the surveillance guys behind would not draw attention to their presence, nor intervene. Low key, which was the way of most things that the Service did. Under-resourced and under-staffed, which was the reason that she was in the water and bloody near to being swept off her feet, and why only Boot was with her – and why they had brought the freelancer, Merc, to do a job with a gang of local misfits. It was where they were, unlikely to change. She was shouldered aside . . . had just realised that Merc’s hand was locked on the girl’s leg and had seen her face as the moon passed a cloud gap, recognising a mix of triumph and shock, of elation and exhaustion . . . and realised that Boot had come into the water and was beside her, and had forced her to back away from Merc and now supported him. Boot had waded into the water which broke in wavelets above his knees, and the suit was his pride and joy, and he was inseparable from those brogues, and for once his trilby was tilted.
Daff accepted, took the girl. No kid gloves as Daff handled her. She accepted that the girl had the waterproof gear and had been on the board, and Merc had been in the water and had supported her, and Daff reckoned the girl had damn near killed him. She pulled the girl ashore, dumped her, and was turning to go back in and take her turn with Merc. Boot struggled under his weight. She was turning when the girl reached up and clawed at Daff’s sleeve, and coughed hard, spat water, then found her voice.
‘It is because of me that we are here, him and me. He was their prisoner. I killed his guard. I did . . . I would have given my life for him, because we are together, will be, always together, him and me.’
Boot splashed up the bank, sodden shoes spitting sand, and let Merc subside. He said to Daff, crisp and authoritative. ‘I doubt violins will play, and diamonds sparkle. What we said, Do it. Get him out and away.’
She did. Left Boot behind her and doubted he’d be sympathetic to a kid who might have defected with high hopes of the future or might have simply been swept up in the tide of events swirling around her. Daff thought Boot’s conversation skills would be a rude awakening. She hooked Merc up, had one of his arms over her shoulder and hissed for him to make a last effort and they went up the slope and were close to the tank on its plinth. They were passing the surveillance car and a window came down and a half bottle was hold out. She took it, poured a slug down Merc’s throat, and one for herself, and handed it back. She saw the boys inside look at her, like she was an entrant in a wet T-shirt competition, gave them a finger and a grin, and lugged him to the car.
He could of course refuse what she and Boot had planned as the aftermath – assuming he made it out, if he came through – but she did not expect him to. Into the passenger seat, doors slammed, engine engaged, a spinning turn and the tyres kicked mud and the last of the snow, and ice crystals were lit ahead of them. The headlights gave a final glimpse of the churning river, showing no sign of interest in them as it powered towards the Baltic, and she hit the road.
‘You all right, Merc?’
‘What else? I’m all right.’
The Major had waited.
He saw the first car pull away and, as it turned, it lit the old man, the one who wore the tweed suit and whose glasses were askew and his hat about to topple and who dragged the girl up the beach and towards the silhouette of the raised tank on its plinth. He had been correct in his analysis of the cause of the explosion, and did not have evidence to support his argument. His sergeant did not intervene, stayed correctly silent. The Major would face no Inquiry Board, would not have to justify his actions: it would be reported that a gang of smugglers, probably trafficking in Class A or amphetamines, had been pursued towards the Friendship Bridge, and one had shot himself in the forest as the hunters closed on him, and one had stolen a small dinghy which had capsized upstream from the bridge, and one had attempted to run across the bridge and had been shot after repeatedly refusing to surrender . . . And a missing girl, the sister of one of those killed in the Kupchino district explosion? He knew nothing of her, had no knowledge of her since releasing her from custody in the Big House. Nor could the Major have justified, with coherence, what he had done and why. He would remember her face.
Walking back from the river bank to the vehicle, the Major told his sergeant that they would return to the farmhouse, collect the lieutenant, would pay them generously, and get coffee or sweet tea, or a bowl of broth to warm them . . . He had forgotten a body in the water, would not retrieve it in his memory. He could not have explained himself, and did not wish to.
In the morning, after a few hours’ deep sleep, he would be back at his desk.
Dawn broke, a fair start to a new day with a bright chill in the air as the streets and bridges over the Thames awoke to the bustle of a fresh commuter rush.
The bed folded and stowed, and the duvet tightly rolled and consigned to a cupboard, the Maid had been out into the corridor and had borrowed a carpet cleaner from the early shift and had tidied her own, and Daff’s, area, and had run the machine purposefully across Boot’s room. She had telephoned upstairs, to the quarters of the Big Boss, and given a cursory résumé and had heard a heaved sigh of relief. She had called a number in the Pimlico district north of the river where a small department handled ‘safe houses’, the accommodation bureau for defectors, and employed discreet minders. ‘I gather she’s just a bit of a girl who was slip-streamed into an exfiltration from Russia. Arrival time? Mid-morning, I think. Has very little importance except for what she witnessed in the last forty-eight hours, just needs a little husbandry . . . Oh, yes – if a piano was available that would be good. Thanks, more later.’ The Maid was a woman who could put her hand on any small item that might – one day, sometime – be of use. At the back of a drawer in her desk, after some rummaging, she put her finger on a picture hook and nail.
It was a print, sadly, not an original. But good enough and what was possible. Inside Boot’s room she looked for a decent sighting and fastened on a stretch of bare wall to the left of the reproduction of the Wellington Boot. She unwrapped the frame, binned the protective packaging, estimated the right height then slipped off a shoe and used its heel as a hammer to bang in the nail, and hung it. The mission, seemingly completed with success, had been Copenhagen, Boot’s name for it. The image was of Copenhagen, the horse that had carried the Duke throughout the day at Waterloo, ‘steady and calm’ under fire, and which had been buried – 182 years ago – under a large tree on his estate. It was a bronze fashioned from a death-mask and located in the quad area of the school bearing the victor’s name. A proud head, some said, with irresistible traits of stubborn superiority. She dusted the glass, admired it, and thought it fitting . . . Much to chat about with her parrot that evening.
She had the cars booked, Daff coming in first, and Boot later and he was bringing the girl . . . A triumph. Of course. She would have expected nothing less.
It was Arthur who spotted her first.
‘Look here, Roy, look at her, see what she’s carrying.’
‘Arthur, no lie, they cracked it.’
‘Must have been a big one, and those are a decent pair – of bottles.’
Both could chuckle without moving their mouths. They saw the blonde pay off her taxi, pause for a moment and look up at the great building which was her second – or first – home. She carried two bottles in a transparent plastic airport bag. Might have picked them up wherever she’d boarded the first flight of the day. Both Roy and Arthur, staple to their trade as marksmen, had decent vision, could see the bottles wore the Bollinger label.
‘I’d wager, Roy, we’re the first to know that a good one has done the business.’
‘Like the old days, turning back the clock.’
Not that either of them spoke to her as she came to the checkpoint, and as she juggled with her backpack sliding on one shoulder. And had the bottles’ bag in one hand, and needed to ferret in her shoulder-bag for the ID card, and a wintry smile, not returned by either of
them, and both were trained for observation of detail. She was gone, a haughty swing of the hips which might have been for them and might not.
‘You see her legs, Roy, her feet?’
‘What I saw, Arthur, was that they were still soaking wet, and the jeans were all damp right up to you know where. She’ll have come through on the red-eye flight from some place where she had to do some paddling. You think it was rough, where she was?’
‘And she smelled, like it was ditch-water, horrid and stale . . . Walked across a river? Don’t know . . . Main thing, it all went well, or there’d not be bottles for breaking open.’
‘Spot on, went well. No argument.’
The stool supported Boot.
A Damned Serious Business Page 50
